Hacking churches: Shadowy group targets church websites

"Anonymous" is the self-label of a loose-knit group of hackers that has started vandalizing religious websites. In the latest such case, the Vatican'ssite, vatican.va, was disabled on March 7, not answering efforts to connect to it. (However, the site was back up by that night.)

Various Italian media carried reports that Anonymous claimed responsibility for the malfunction. On one Italian site, a posting said the attack was an "act of revenge" for abuses like priestly pedophilia and the historic practice of selling indulgences for sins.

Other observers noted that the attack followed Tuesday's indictments of five hackers -- in Britain and Ireland as well as the U.S. From that viewpoint, the attack could look like retaliation.

Before the Vatican incident, the shadowy Anonymous hit three churches in North Carolina. Each defacement included an anti-Christian video by British scientist Richard Dawkins (who is not thus far suspected of having an actual hand in the matter).

And just in case all of that didn’t prove their feelings about faith, the Anonymizers included a rambling screed:

"Let us be clear from the start: any kind of religion is a sickness to this world. A sickness that creates hate and intolerance, a sickness that brings people to wage war on their fellow people, a sickness that has come to this world long time ago, when mankind wasn't educated, a sickness that brought false hope and suppression to those who believed and often even more terror and suppression to those who dared not to believe . . ."

. . . etcetera. It's more than 400 words long, not all of them fit for polite company.

Not that the perps are fixated on religion; they seem to be anarchists, rather like the assorted "Occupiers" who started with Wall Street. Over the past year, Anonymous hackers have launched attacks on various American and British government sites, and on security firms like Stratfor and PandaLabs.

For all its activity, though, Anonymous has mysteriously little to say about itself. Its Facebook page is "liked" by more than 2,100 people, and 29 other Facebook members are talking about it, but there's nothing on the information page. The "Related Posts," though, have more than 17 comments, most in Spanish.